You Can't Take It with You
by Chasing Liquor
Summary: Tag for "The Daedalus Variations." Keller looks in on McKay after the events of the episode; McKay tries to understand where he fits in the grand cosmic scheme. McKeller.


**Disclaimer**: MGM, let's face it... I've been putting your executives' children through college, so let's not get into any litigation.

**Spoilers:** The Daedalus Variations

**Description:** Tag for "The Daedalus Variations." Keller looks in on McKay after the events of the episode; McKay tries to understand where he fits in the grand cosmic scheme.

**A/N**: Another one-shot that came to me. I hope you enjoy it, and please do leave me a review and let me know how it turned out.

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**You Can't Take It with You**

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It was a guilty pleasure of hers – watching him from the doorway.

He was so unaccustomed to interruptions that he wouldn't have noticed her if she stood there all night. And there were times when she was tempted to. To watch him work was to watch a force of nature impose its will on a fluid environment. There was such intensity there, such desperation. And a sharp edge that hadn't been there yesterday.

He'd been grateful to her for patching him up earlier, but he'd also been distant. A visit from Teyla and Torren had perked him up, but once mother, child, and Sheppard were gone, the scientist had quieted again.

When she'd released him, it was with instructions to return to his quarters and rest. But it didn't surprise her in the least that he hadn't listened. She'd expected as much.

"I see you're following doctor's orders, as usual."

McKay jumped in his chair like a child might during a scary movie, nearly knocking over the half-filled and cooling cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

"Jesus, what – why – do you _have_ to always do that?"

Keller smiled innocently.

"Do what?"

"Oh, don't give me that look. You do it every time."

She slowly made her way from the door over to the scientist, perching herself on the edge of the table next to his, crossing her arms.

"Well, you wouldn't have had to worry about it if you'd just gone to your room and slept like I told you to," she chided, glancing down at the bandage peaking out from under the sleeve of his t-shirt. "I thought you said it hurt."

McKay stared up at her defiantly, but found his concentration lapsing as she looked back at him.

"It does hurt!" he insisted, the corners of his mouth turning down. "But there were… still some things I wanted to, uh…" He paused, looking away as if to regain his bearings. "Some things I wanted to check."

Keller usually would have dismissed that as the flimsy excuse of a career workaholic, but there was something different tonight, and she just couldn't quite pin it down.

He hid things better than most people knew. He'd confessed once that the key to obfuscation was to choose a series of meaningless things to talk about, and to speak of them as often as possible; that way, no one bothered looking for the other stuff – the things you didn't want folks to know.

She leaned over to get a look at his laptop.

"What are you working on?"

He glanced up at her uncomfortably, then back at the screen.

"Just some data I was able to smuggle off of the Daedalus."

"I didn't realize you managed to take anything with you. Is it information on the multiverse drive?"

"Yeah…" he replied cryptically. "Among other things."

Keller noticed the way his eyes flickered when he said that, and she wished she could crawl inside his mind and find the source of his disquiet. What was it he'd brought back with him?

"Anything interesting?" she asked casually.

"Not really," he lied. "Just some, uh… logs and what have you."

And there was her answer. She knew the rhythms of his speech, and she knew what it meant when he paused. He was either nervous or confused or concealing something.

She smiled patiently.

"What's in the logs?"

"Nothing important. Just status updates from Commander Sobol, and… one or two from me."

Keller arched an eyebrow.

"You?"

"Well, you know, the… other… me," he noted uncomfortably.

"What did you – I mean _he_ – say?"

McKay shook his head dismissively.

"Nothing. Just a bunch of technical stuff," he said darkly, crinkling his forehead and scrubbing a hand over his face before adding in a gravelly voice, "Nothing useful, I'll tell you that much."

The way he uttered the last remark, with such plain contempt, physically jolted her. She frowned, sliding over from the edge of her table to the edge of McKay's, laying a tentative hand on his shoulder. The touch drew his hand away from his face.

"What's the matter?" she asked quietly.

He shook his head dumbly, as if that alone constituted an answer. When she didn't move her hand, though, and she didn't stop looking down at him, he began to feel a kind of warm, soft claustrophobia that compelled him to speak.

"There was a third me too," he said, his eyes scanning the parts of the room she didn't occupy. "A third all of us. They starved to death, I think. Or froze. Or… whatever."

Keller cringed.

"You saw the body."

"Yeah. It's… kind of funny in a way."

"What is?"

"Well, I mean… it was _his_ research. I took his computer from him and used what was there to figure out how to save us. But it was his, not mine. But we're the same person. So, I robbed my own grave, I guess. You know?"

Keller took a deep breath, trying to process the subtext of his ramblings. She let her hand trail a little higher, lightly circling her thumb in one spot on the side of his neck.

"It wasn't you, though."

"I… I know it wasn't." He paused as if confused. "But it _was_."

"No, it wasn't," she insisted. "You had the same name and probably a lot in common, but that doesn't make him you."

"How the hell not?"

"Parallel universes are created every time someone makes a choice, right?"

"Yeah."

"Then there isn't another human being in the multiverse – whatever his name is or whatever he looks like – who has made the exact same choices as you have every second of his life. So no matter how many universes there are out there, and no matter how many Atlantises have a Rodney McKay, we're the only one who has _you_."

McKay let out a nervous breath that might have been a tiny laugh, meeting her eyes for a moment before looking down. She said it so earnestly and with such affection that he didn't dare to disbelieve her. He was surprised and embarrassed to find his neck leaning into her hand.

"Um… thanks," he said softly, tentatively meeting her gaze again.

Keller nodded, her lips curving into a smile. Her hand lingered on his skin for a few moments longer, and then she pulled it back and let it fall to her side. He felt its absence.

"C'mon," she said, standing up from the table, gesturing toward the door with a tilt of her head. "Let's get you back."

He nodded docilely, but didn't move to stand, looking back at the computer instead.

"Rodney?"

The scientist glanced up at her with an unreadable expression.

"Yeah, I'll be right there. Can you give me a minute, though?"

She looked at him for a long moment, wondering if it would be prudent to honor his request, before finally deciding that she had no right not to. With a small nod, she let her hand graze his shoulder before turning to leave.

A minute later, he was all alone again, sans the dull hum of the living city around him.

He lifted his hands to the keyboard, cycling through the logs on his monitor until he landed on one of the last entries: "McKAY, RODNEY – 1445"

His finger hovered over the 'enter' key in indecision, before he finally tapped it. In the days that followed, he'd wonder whether he meant to press it, or whether it was reflex.

The archive list disappeared, replaced by the image of a duplicate Rodney McKay, who sat soberly at a Daedalus work station.

"This is, uh… probably the last entry. I'm not really sure who it's for, since we're leaving. Well, posterity's sake, I suppose…"

The Rodney looked tired, and when he tilted his head down to rub his eyes, the dark circles beneath them appeared so pronounced as to resemble a baseball player's eye black.

"I'm not sure I can really say where it went wrong. It was a brilliant idea, obviously, and I tried to take precautions, but they wanted the thing so damn quick, I had to cut corners. Elizabeth wanted me to stop, but after she died, there wasn't anyone left to tell me 'no.'"

He let out a frustrated sigh.

"Colonel Sumner wanted it done in two weeks, so I had it done in two weeks. But I tried to tell him! I _tried_ to _tell_ him! What was I supposed to do? If I'd said no, he would have just had Zelenka finish it, and I wouldn't have been there when things went wrong."

He shook his head, his pale, drawn face glowing like an apparition as the desk light beside him shined at an odd angle.

"Not that it mattered. A lot of damn good _I_ did. I lost control of the thing after the first jump, and I never got it back." He ran a hand through his hair, longer and shaggier than McKay's. "I can't stop thinking about Atlantis. About what's going to happen to them when we don't come back. Sumner sent us out to find a ZPM, but instead he's going to lose a ship."

The Rodney's eyes were wet.

"Without Daedalus and without a ZPM, Atlantis will be gone w–within a couple months. And, and…" Ghosts spilled out of him. "We'll be _here_. On th – this – 'arable' planet, in a universe none of us recognize. We don't read any Stargate on the planet, so… I guess we'll just… well, we'll make do with… it'll be fine…"

He began to shake, his jittering hands just barely visible at the bottom of the screen, parallel tear tracks forming on either side of his sickly face.

"If… you do send a rescue… if you ever find this, I just… I just want you to know that, that if I could change things" – his voice cracked – "if I could... m–make it right…"

The Rodney broke down over the succeeding seconds and let his face fall forward 'till it hit his desk, words drifting beyond his capability, and McKay sat back in his chair and watched him, and with each frame of the video and each breath he spent to watch it, he could feel within him the infinite pull of so many universes' stars.

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**FIN**


End file.
